Reminds me of my youth, but this pair are wallowing in decadence!!! WTF good is a sniper-scope when the point is to clear a crowded street? These two are stylin', going in for a useless affectaction, a non-functional status symbol...at least as far as I'm concerned.

I would also note that in the run-up to the passing of Alberta's Bill 44, which would have in its original form rescinded the hate speech provisions from that provinces human rights act--a repeal which Ezra supported enthusiastically--white supremacists were actively trying to recruit followers to the Calgary area, arguing that after 44 passed it would become land of The Free for Neo-Nazis. Only after an Aryan Guard beefed-up with new recruits marched last year did the province back down from the repeal.

They've also published their correspondence with the Information Commissioner's Office. This first one from the 29th lodges what seems to me to be a perfectly valid complaint in regards to the ICO's original statement:

The ICO did not issue a retraction, but did offer a weakened statement that they said their original statement should be read to mean (as I argued here). Acton makes this clear in a final letter, dated February 1st:

Errors like this are frequently made in press reports and the ICO cannot be expected to correct them, particularly when the ICO has not itself referred to penalties or sanctions in its own statement.

For all the above reasons the ICO will not be issuing a further press statement covering these points. The ICO does not wish to encourage further media reports on the matter, indeed our original press statement was only drafted for one journalist [Jonathon Leake] in response to a specific enquiry.

Although, frankly Mr. Leake may be getting a bum deal in this case; it is not obvious that the ICO statement should be interpreted as the ICO now suggests.

Dear Green Party members: Elizabeth May is way too good for you. If she should lose any silly little leadership race, or decide that's its really not worth playing den mother to a gang of ungrateful children for about $50,000 a year and refuse to participate, then you will be truly fucked, returned to square one, raising funds by holding salmon bakes and selling magic mushrooms out of the back of your old Volkswagen van.

Their entire submission to the Parliamentary Select Committee on Science and Technology can be found here. As to the earlier claim from the U.K. Information Commisioner's Office (ICO) that UEA breached the FOIA (Freedom of Information Act), this is where that seems to stand:

3.7.6 On 22 January 2010, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) released a statement to a journalist, which was widely misinterpreted in the media as a finding by the ICO that UEA had breached Section 77 of the FOIA by withholding raw data. A subsequent letter to UEA from the ICO (29 January 2010) indicated that no breach of the law has been established; that the evidence the ICO had in mind about whether there was a breach was no more than prima facie; and that the FOI request at issue did not concern raw data but private email exchanges.More on that particular aspect of the investigation here.

And a bit more on the many, many vexatious FOI requests filed by the denialist community:

3.7.4 In July 2009 UEA received an unprecedented, and frankly administratively overwhelming, deluge of FOIA requests related to CRU. These amounted to 61 requests out of a 2009 total of 107 related to CRU, compared to annual totals of 2 in 2008 and 4 in 2007 (University totals for those years were 204, 72 and 44 respectively). Accordingly CRU approached the Global Climate Observing System (GCOS), an organization within the WMO, to see if it would request the WMO to seek permission from each of its members (the NMSs) for CRU to release the primary station data for each country. WMO declined, but indicated that the appropriate procedure was for the request to come from the UK NMS (the Met Office). The Met Office agreed this was the correct procedure, and sent a letter of support to accompany an explanatory letter to each NMS on 30 November 2009. As of 1 February 2010, 35 responses to 160 requests have been received from the NMSs. Most are positive, but some are negative (confirming the constraints preventing CRU releasing the requested data).

So: validation from a most unusual source. Unfortunately, the EcoFreako website seems to have disappeared. However, here's a link to MP3s of them playing "Earth Has A Fever" (sung to the tune of "Cat Scratch Fever", and "I Want To Mock Al Gore All Night", sung to the tune of...well, you figure it out.

Furthermore, the resultant controversy also appears to have dinged Winnipeg MP Rod Bruinooge, who is himself Metis. On February 21, Bruinooge stated to reporters at the Winnipeg Free Press that, though he disagreed with Goldring's tirade, he also disagreed with the private member's bill which inspired it (This bill was introduced in November by Winnipeg NDP MP Pat Martin; it would exonerate Riel and erect a monument to him on Parliament Hill). Bruinooge said:

Sunday, February 21, 2010

Jimi Bostock says he did not hack CRU. All that suggestive language was just that, suggestive. But its a small world, and the nerdosphere an even smaller part of it. I bet the Norfolk Constabulary has a list of suspects that won't barely reach two dozen.

The problem with this statement is that, according to UEA, the response to Mr. Holland's request, and to the other requests generated by Stephen McIntyre's efforts at Climate Audit, was infused with advice given to the UEA by officers within the ICO. For example, UEA's response to the ICO statement says:

...and Phil Jones notes in various emails that the ICO was involved in crafting the response to Holland's and the other frivolous FOI requests. Which raises the question: did the ICO advise UEA to engage in actions it now deems to be improper?

Over at the denialist website The Air Vent, some dude named Kondealer (who, if that is his real name, probably had a rough time in highschool) has been trying to get an answer from the ICO, and managed to elicit this rather impressive display of squirming. An excerpt:

Discounting the notion that UEA did not contact the ICO at all, I suppose it will be up the Muir Russell inquiry to determine how deeply complicit the ICO was in the behavior it now finds so disturbing.

Oh, and, irony of Ironies, Kondealer, involved as he is with the gang of bloggers that first flooded CRU with vexatious FOI requests, will now begin bombarding the ICO with...wait for it!...a vexatious FOI request:

I think it is a Eurasian cry against the low-inflation-at-any-cost policies that many central banks have pursued over the past 20 years, at such a cost to economic growth and the lives of so many of their citizens.

Thursday, February 18, 2010

Arthur Kent, brother of Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Peter Kent, lays on a pounding on the Harper government over an Afghanistan story you may know nothing about--Hamid Karzai renaming Zarar Muqbul to his cabinet after the disgraced former minister presided over the embezzlement of up to one-third of Canadian aid dollars donated under the U.N.’s Law and Order Trust Fund (LOTFA):

See, when you're young and your younger brother is smaller and weaker than you, you beat them up repeatedly until they learn not to cross you. Peter Kent obviously didn't do that, and now look what's happened?

ScienceDaily (Feb. 17, 2010) — The southern limit of permanently frozen ground, or permafrost, is now 130 kilometers further north than it was 50 years ago in the James Bay region, according to two researchers from the Department of Biology at Université Laval.Read Deltoid to comprehend the full craptacularity of the U.K. Press on this issue (they make the National Post look almost slightly less craptacular); read RC for an evaluation of the various "gates". Short version: they mostly involve typos. And just in case someone brings it up, the two researchers above conclude:

While climate change is the most probable explanation for this phenomenon, the lack of long term climatic data for the area makes it impossible for the researchers to officially confirm this. Professor Payette notes, however, that the average annual temperature of the northern sites he has studied for over 20 years has increased by 2 degrees Celsius.

Apparently, back before the turn of the century (based on the old email address), I did. Its been so long I'm not really sure that I would understand the correct answer to my question if someone told it to me today.

People don't even DO Phil. of Sci. that way any more. Anyway, I eventually found my copy of Braithwaite. It did not prove particularly enlightening.

Well, maybe not; Aussie Denier Jimi Bostock may be enmeshed in a personal fantasy. He is nevertheless the first blogger to hint at inside knowledge of the CRU Hack (which precipitated Climategate, for anyone's who has been on Mars the past couple of months).

What it shows is that many of the files that finally made it into the final .zip file leaked to the public on November 17th (FOI2009.zip) were either "accessed" or "modified" by the hacker(s) between about September 15th, 2009 and mid-November. And this means of course these files were in the hands of the hacker(s) during that time frame(*).

Which matches up well with the dates Mr. Bostock is peddling for the start of the "campaign" he became involved in. And we know that the U.K. police investigating the crack are looking for ideological extremists. Reading the entirety of Mr. Bostock's post, its pretty clear he fits that bill as well.

(*) A conclusion also arrived at, though perhaps through a slightly different route, by a forensic analysis conducted on behalf of the U.K. Gaurdian. Origonally, it was thought that the hack had taken place in about the third week of November, right in advance of the actual leak date.

I could argue with this, but why the fuck bother? I will just point out that Brad Trost, while not officially gay, is hot enough to make the cut. His ass is so firm you could bounce a dime off it. Not that anyone has, as far as I can confirm.

When I asked Roger how this statement squared his earlier complaints, he followed up with a post where he reiterated his contention that the "IPCC intentionally mis-cited" the paper. But an intentional mis-cite is, surely, an "unfair" reference, yet Mr. Muir-Wood insists his paper was treated fairly by the IPCC. Roger surely has a little more work to do. Arm-waving in the direction of an audio-cast that is supposed to explain everything doesn't really cut it.

Saturday, February 13, 2010

I am trying to restrain my typical dark cynicism over stuff like this, but if one more stupid thing happens, like for example the Canadian Olympic Beer Tent catches fire, I may not be able to stop myself from whipping out the Atlanta, Georgia comparisons.

Did Olympic security not think that a West Coast Event would attract West Coast, anti-G20, anti-globalization, black mask anarchist types?

PS. Riot pictures here. Quite a few of them. By the way, I'm on the cops side here 100%. Brain as many of them as you need to. They're young. It'll grow back.

Holland is talking about the Seaway International Bridge Crisis, natives have been protesting armed guards at a bridge that runs across the U.S./ Canada border through Akwesasne. Since Vic Toews took over public safety, the locals have been waiting for him to step in and do something about the issue. He hasn't, and apparently doesn't want anyone else to either.

The Canada Magazine Fund and Publishing Assistance Programhave finally been merged to create the Canada Periodical Fund. On the up-side, Macleans and a few other large large circulation magazines will have their subsidies cut by $1,000,000 plus, though they will still get a cheque of some sort. On the downside, and as expected, small circ literary mags will no longer get funding. An analysis of the winners and losers here. A particularly interesting fact:Agricultural publications are exempt from the $1.5 million cap on grants based on the special contribution they make to Canadian society, according to the government. As far as Masthead can determine, this only affects one publication to date, The Western Producer, which received $1.8 million in PAP subsidy in 2008-2009. The weekly has a paid circulation of 61,000 with offices across western Canada, but is headquartered in Saskatoon, which is represented by Tory MP Maurice Vellakott.

From DeSmog Blog, we are directed to this story from IT-Networks, which looks at what we know about the CRU hack an IT perspective. Short version: it was a deliberate, skilled attempt to target

Phil Jones, the head of the CRU; Professor Keith Briffa, who studied tree rings; Tim Osborn, who worked on climate modelling for modern and archaeological data; and Mike Hulme, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research.

A couple of details mentioned in the story that I have written about previously.

1) The hack was launched from a computer based on the east coast of north America.

This is deduced from the naming conventions used by CRU's email system, which also serve as time-stamps. More here.

2) Digital forensic analysis shows that the zipped archive of emails and documents was not produced on a single date. Instead it was created by copying the files over a number of weeks, with bursts on 30 September 2009, 10 October and 16 November. On the last date a folder of computer analysis code by Osborn was added to the package.

Early on, BBC meteorologist Paul Hudson implied that he had been shopped a subset of the hacked emails on October 12th, though it is not clear whether these were from the hacker (Hudson did not specify). He later went silent on the topic, but if the hacks were taking place over a 6 week period, then the idea that the emails came from the hacker becomes much more plausible. In fact, there is an interesting possible sequence of events here. On October 9th, Hudson writes a piece entitled What happened to global warming? which inspires a certain amount of email snark from the four scientists mentioned above, and it is just those emails that wind up in Hudson's in-box on the 12th. Is the hacker "telling tales" on the four CRU scientists in the hopes that Hudson will somehow respond?

Also, given that the N.A. location of the hack puts us in the middle of denier land, it would be interesting to find out what messages were hacked on what date and see how these correlate with what is going on Climate Audit at around the same time.

PS. Might be a good time to mention that Swifthack is still out there, countering the crud.

So says Lifesite, and who can gainsay them: Shelly Glover's interview on CBC's Power & Politics is pretty specific about what won't be in the government's plan. Rather less clear on what will be in it, although it will apparently involve "clean water, nutrition, and inoculations". Also "prevention and education", although the presumably the "prevention" part would not involve education re contraceptive options.

Derek Burney OC, Canwest's Chairman of the Board, said he thanked the Asper sibs for getting the fuck out now, assholes!, and if they were ever seen on the property again he would call the Cops.

Also, there's some information in the story about the company's "forward looking statements". Apparently, they all start with "We are so totally fucking doomed that..."

PS. Personally I figure I've chopped 5 cents per share off CanWest's market value. Booyah! That's why they won't stick me on their shitty "full comment" page! But they've still got a chance...morons! Otherwise wait 'til I run across one of them (Jonathon Kay, I'm looking at you!!) after their midlife career change, which is sure to involve burgers, hot grease and a spatula! I'll ask for extra mayo, and I will never be satisfied!

It has become clear that the efforts of climate change denier Stephen McIntyre and his followers at Climate Audit to extract data from CRU in East Anglia through multiple FOI requests (dozens) amounted to a Denial Of Service attack against a scientific institution. Nor is it the first time McIntyre has been caught out at this sort of thing. Ben Santer, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, once wrote:

And of course, there was his 2007 attack on GISS (which was admittedly more a sign of lousy internet manners than ill-intent).

Some have suggested that the actions of McIntyre and his small army of tea-baggers with spread-sheets are undertaken in good faith. That the people around CA really just want to "set the information free", or some such nonsense. I find this difficult to believe. For one thing, as a strategy for political activism--sandbagging a gov. agency/researcher/institution you disapprove of with time wasting requests for information--is as old as the hills. Recently we have seen it here in Canada, with the Far Right's assault on the Canadian Human Rights Commission and corresponding provincial human rights bodies. Bloggers lodged frivolous human rights complaints to demonstrate that the system didn't work, bragged left and right that they were really out to hassle the agency, and then whined righteously when their frivolous complaints were dismissed. Right wing pressure groups launched pointless FOI requests, and then complained that their demands were not instantly met.

Nor are climatologists the only scientists to have suffered this kind of treatment. After Richard Lenski published his recent work on mutations in E. Coli, creationist Andy Schlafly (son of Phyllis) hounded him for his "raw data", all of which turned out to be available in the original paper. (And this, interestingly enough, highlights another occasional McIntyre stratagem...to demand data he's already been given.)

In any case, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, its likely a duck. Climate Audit is the center of a harassment campaigned being waged by anti-science activists against climate scientists. There's nothing more to it than that. It is not a science website.

The feds have been taking some flack for the Canadian Olympic pavilion in Vancouver and, yeah, it looks like a beer tent. But this site shows a number of the big pavilions for comparison purposes, and for the most part they incline towards the ugly. Alberta House resembles a bus shelter. Saxony House looks like a ginger-bread chalet. And what the hell is that?Its Irish House, and its definitely (and proudly) a gigantic beer tent. Being right located right next to a pub (Doolin's Irish), it even allows you to simulate an old fashioned Belfast pub crawl, as made famous in Jame Joyce's Ulysses. Just don't get nicked by the Bulls!

Monday, February 08, 2010

The amazing Buckets has now confirmed Ezra Levant's back-dating of a post that may well prove important to the defamation case being brought against him by CHRC lawyer Giacomo Vigna. Put crudely, Vigna has sued Levant for suggesting that he (Vigna) faked an illness to get out of a CHRT (Canadian Human Rights Tribunal) hearing; in his "Correction" , Levant admits that Vigna was indeed able to secure a doctor's note for whatever ailed him, AND that he turned said note over to the tribunal. All of which Levant had asserted previously was NOT THE CASE.

In the comments to a previous post, lawyer Ted Betts speculated as to why Levant's correction might have been issued in the first place:

Yesterday, I suggested that Ezra Levant might have back-dated a post in which he retracted some of the false information he had been pushing re Giacomo Vigna, a CHRC lawyer that Levant will be meeting in an Ottawa courtroom tomorrow morning at 10:00 AM.

Buckets asked why somebody would care to back date a post? Well--and I am of course speculating here--when you have so many acolytes following your defamation cases, some of whom are also getting sued, often because they took your word as truth on some point or another, and you are forced to make an embarrassing factual concession to one of your legal opponents... Maybe you want to do so in a manner that will bring as little attention to the admission as possible. Stick your "correction" among week-old posts where most people are likely to miss it.

In any case, much of the evidence for back-dating came from the comments to this particular post. For one thing, there were only three there originally (plus one test comment I made yesterday) as opposed to the 30 or 40 a Levant post usually generates. Furthermore, while the post itself was dated January 18th, the earliest comment to it was from the 23rd, almost a week later.

Yesterday, sometime during the evening...those comments were made to disappear (as CC pointed out in my comments). By whom, I wonder? And to what end?

Nanos last(?) poll had the Tories just short of 40%. owever, the improvement noted here and elsewhere apparently isn't enough to tempt federal Libs towards bringing down the government in March, which probably wouldn't work anyway with Mr. Layton not at 100% and, therefore, probably looking to avoid the stress of a campaign. One would hope though, that, the Libs will now oppose some of the pending legislation that's athema to their core support (C-391, anybody?) a little more forcefully. Some people, me at least, would like to see them win one or two as the opposition.

An interesting post from Ezra Levant dated January 18th. I say interesting because, well, I missed it at the time, which (if you know me) is a bit surprising. Also, such comments as were made in response to the post are all dated from January 23rd and later. The post's title: Correction, and in it Ezra retracts some false information he gave out re Giacomo Vigna, whose lawsuit against the Ez goes forward this week.

Wonder if there's any way to show whether or not the Ez wrote it later and back-dated it?

On Thursday afternoon the onion ring spoke to supporters on Parliament Hill.

Now, you're reading this here because MSM coverage of the event was scandalously poor. And since I'm writing it up for no money, you're not getting a full transcript. Fuck that. But, in brief, the onion ring has demanded Stephen Harper's resignation, and has offered to assume the Prime Ministership in his place. In a most magnanimous gesture, the onion ring attempted to reach out to Canadians who can't condone or have a moral objection to or simply don't like onion rings. It has agreed to participate in a coalition government with several other popular fast food items, a coalition of the grilling, if you will, although the French Fries are willing to be served au souvęreignist.

Both Libs and NDP have already said OK, so what did that accomplish? Not much of a trap. Meanwhile, the increasingly isolated Mr. Spector insists that the opposition parties are playing checkers, while Harper is playing an electric kazoo amped up to 11.